The present invention arises from a new area of recognition and development focussed on the technology of low-temperature, crystalline-structure-processed devices, and in particular mechanical, mechanical and electrical, so-called MEMS (micro-electromechanical) devices, and devices organized into monolithic arrays in layers, that opens up a broad new field of potential devices and applications not heretofore so inexpensively and conveniently made practical and practicable. This new field of possible devices, from which a number of inventions, one of which is specifically addressed in this disclosure, springs effectively from the recognition that internal crystalline-structure processing performed within the bodies of a wide variety of different materials, is capable of enabling fabrication of small (perhaps even down to devices formed from small molecular clusters), versatile, widely controllable and producible, accurate, mechanical, electromechanical and MEMS devices that can be formed very inexpensively, and, with respect to laser processing, in uncontrolled and room-temperature environments not requiring vacuum chambers, etc.
Especially, the invention offers significant opportunities for the building, relatively cheaply and very reliably, of very tiny mechanical devices that can be deployed in dense two-dimensional and three-dimensional complex arrays and stacked arrangements. These devices can take on a large range of different configurations, such as individuated, single-device configurations , monolithic single-layer array arrangements of like devices, similar monolithic arrays of combined electrical and mechanical devices, and in vertically integrated and assembled stacks and layers of complex devices, simply not achievable through conventional prior art processes and techniques. By enabling room-temperature fabrication, otherwise easily damaged and destroyed layer-supporting substrates, including fabricated-device under-layers, can readily be employed.
The field of discovery and recognition which underpins the invention disclosed herein, can be practiced with a very wide range of semiconductor and other materials (mentioned below herein) in arrays that can be deployed on rigid substrates of various characters, and on a wide range of flexible materials, such as traditional flex-circuit materials (polymers and plastics), metallic foil materials, and even fabric materials. Additionally, the field of development from which the present invention emerges can be employed with large-dimension bulk materials, as well as with various thin-film materials. The present invention is described in this broader-ranging setting. With regard to the latter category of materials, the process of this invention can take advantage of traditional thin-film semiconductor processing techniques to shape and organize unique devices, which are otherwise prepared in accordance with the internal crystalline-structure-processing proposed by the present invention, thus to achieve and offer mechanical properties in a broad arena of new opportunities.
In this setting, the invention disclosed in this document is specifically described, for illustration purposes, in relation to crystal-structure-processed semiconductor mechanical devices, either as individuated, single devices, or in arrays of devices organized into monolithic, layer-type arrangements, as well as to methodology and system organizations especially suited to the preparation and fabrication of such devices. The invention proposes a unique way, employing, for example, different types of lasers and other illumination sources, effectively to “reach into” the internal crystalline structures different semiconductor materials for the purpose of controllably modifying those structure to produce advantageous mechanical properties in devices, and at sizes very difficult and sometimes not even possible to create via prior art techniques.
From the drawings and the descriptions which now follow, it will become readily apparent how the present invention lends itself to the economic, versatile, multi-material fabrication and use of a large variety of devices, ranging from relatively large devices to extremely small devices (as mentioned earlier), and including various forms of MEMS devices, without the fabrication of these devices, insofar as laser processing involved, necessitating the use of special controlled processing environments, or surrounding processing temperatures above typical room temperature.
With this in mind, the significant improvements and special contributions made to the art of device-fabrication according to the invention will become more fully apparent as the invention description which now follows is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.